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Wrekmeister Harmonies, "You've Always Meant So Much To Me"
This was my first exposure to the work of video artist/composer JR Robinson and it more or less left me absolutely flattened.  You've Always Meant So Much To Me is ostensibly just a single drone piece Robinson wrote to soundtrack one of his films, but a far better description is probably "a veritable Murderers' Row of Chicago's finest black metal and noise musicians converged at Steve Albini's studio to perform a truly crushing, slow-burning, and blackened epic."  More remarkable still: the album is even better than that sounds.
Given the brutal lineage of many of the performers involved (Leviathan, Nachtmystium, Bloodyminded, etc.), it came as a great surprise to me that You've Always Meant So Much To Me starts off sounding a lot like something off of Windy & Carl's We Will Always Be and stays that way for a deliciously long time.  That comparison is a very high compliment coming from me, but it is definitely warranted by the subtly swaying drones, simmering guitar noise, soft female vocals, exhale-like hissing, and warm beauty that unfolds.  In fact, there is no hint of menace to be found at all until around the 12-minute mark, when a high-pitched, quavering whine swells in and harmonizes dissonantly with the underlying drones.  Some crackling inhuman howls appear as well, alleviating any doubts I may have had about whether or not the piece was about to take a very ugly turn.
As jarring as that intrusion sounds, the piece still somehow stays relatively melodic, as the nerve-rattling thrum is perversely soon joined by a looping acoustic guitar arpeggio.  The tension never lets up though, which is why You've Always Meant So Much to Me actually transcends the incredible promise of its opening.  From that point onward, it grows steadily more dense and complicated in two separate directions at once: the melodic bed is lushly augmented with viola, cello, and harmonium while the undercurrent of dread expands in both texture and heft to create a roiling, overwhelming juggernaut of equal parts beauty and nightmare.  Then it all erupts around the 22-minute mark and all of the very patient black metal guys finally get to unleash their howling catharsis.
As explosive and well-earned as the crescendo is, it marks the point where the composition downgrades from "pure genius" to merely "great."  Admittedly, black metal is not my favorite thing, but my critique is somewhat objective in that the howling vocals and distorted power chord riffing are very contemporary and fix the piece at a very specific place in time.  That does not make it any less heavy though and the band deftly avoids all of the cartoonishness and excess that I normally associate with the genre.  Also, to Robinson's credit, I have absolutely no idea what else he could have done instead, as he maintained a smoldering intensity and tension for an improbably long time and a metal eruption is unquestionably a very effective way to release all that accumulated power.  Also, I like the idea of music this brutal and black-hearted being performed in museums (this piece was debuted at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, for example).
After the fury subsides, the composition winds down with a melancholy denouement/fade-out centered around harp, viola, and harmonium with a bit of Tuvan throat singing tossed in for good measure.  It does not come close to recapturing the magic of the piece's first half, but it is still a very effective come-down.  Also, that magic was probably impossible to recapture anyway, as the first 20-minutes of You've Always Meant So Much To Me are basically as good as music can possibly get.  Which is even more remarkable when I remember that this album is actually just a soundtrack to accompany one of Robinson's films, making it just one facet of a multimedia work.  Also, I had never even heard of Robinson until this album came out.  That makes some sense, since he seems to have primary traveled in high art circles as a field recordist/installation artist, but I now have a gnawing sense that I have been missing out on something important.  In any case, I definitely need to track down that film now.  This guy is a monster.
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